A Fraught Place

A Fraught Place is a Walking Simulator style game created by Rob Vicars to accompany 'We Are Islands, After All', the debut album from post-hardcore/metal band 'wars'.

Hi, whoever you are. This is my first attempt at anything like this. I learnt some 3D, some game design, some Unreal Engine 4, and all sorts else so I could pull this tattered little thing together in time for my musical endeavour's debut album release. As such, it's a hopeless disgrace to games. But that sort of fits with the theme, which we'll get onto in a second.

In this ravaged attempt at game design, you are left to wander through, or explore if we're being generous, a desolate, subtly surreal island, that is neither inhabited nor uninhabited. You will stumble upon fleeting glimpses of what seems like attempted communication. Radio waves and static and some voice or other. Broadcasting something. Gibberish? Eventually you may spot a pattern and find a way to reach a juncture all too familiar. An imposing finale.

If you give this a go, and the album too perhaps, I can only offer you the knowledge of this enormous sense of overwhelming gratitude that I now feel for you. You're a good 'un, you are. It was a labour of love and I hope to get better, make more, do more, as ever. This process has seriously meant a great, great deal to me, album of course included, and to get to express these sentiments, the stuff that courses through your veins and keeps you up all night, to get to tie everything together in more than one way, is reward enough.

I'll have a blog link here at some stage that goes a little more in-depth into the nuances of the album and the game together, but for now, it's worth you knowing that We Are Islands, After All and by extension A Fraught Place is based on this existential philosophy about the way we see the world. We look at everything through a filter, a lens made up of our experiences, our hopes and dreams, fears, failures, behaviours and environments. They make us who we are, and this lens, our perspective, is totally unique in each of us. While that gives us boundless opportunity for creative expression and interpretation, it in turn renders us inherently alone, because we cannot share that 'lens' with another in its entirety. There's a beautiful, tragic irony in that the human condition seems to dictate that we crave exactly that, that ultimate connection with another person.